LOS ANGELES — Despite the emergence of favorable policies meant to bring about more equity for Black and Latino college students, policies alone are not enough to do the job.
That was the heart of the message that Estela Bensimon, a professor of higher education and co-director of the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California, delivered during a weekend seminar on college readiness.
“Many studies have shown that policy often gets undermined when it gets down to the implementation stage, not because practitioners are willful in resisting the change but mostly because policymakers tend to assume that a policy on paper is a policy implemented,” Bensimon said. “And the fact is that’s not the case.”
Bensimon commended the rise of performance-based funding schemes that incentivize the cutting of equity gaps — that is, disparities in graduation rates between Black and Latino students and their White counterparts — and efforts to encourage and track the progress that various programs are making in closing gaps along racial and ethnic lines.
